Water Child
by Unadulterated
Summary: Sixteen days ago, a heartbeat stopped. For once, Natasha would like to create some life, rather than take it. Natasha-centric, established Clintasha. Warnings: miscarriage, potentially triggering thoughts.


**This is my first foraging into the Avengers fandom, but I'm sure there will be more. I hope you enjoy.**

**Disclaimer: Not mine. I wish.**

* * *

"We're concerned that the baby may have passed away."

_Tony clutches her shoulders and moans like a dying man, causing Natasha to almost crash into the railing—she shoves him onto the steps. Hangover or no hangover, it's his own fault._

"_Cruelty, thy name is woman," he gripes, and takes a swing at her leg. She dodges, but he grabs onto her shin and she's barely awake, considering she was dead asleep maybe ten minutes ago. In the end, she finds herself nursing a bruised shoulder and glaring up a storm at Tony._

"_Careful," Clint says from the top of the stairs. "The baby, remember?"_

_Natasha rolls her eyes. It's not like it's made of glass._

The doctor's eyes are careful behind spectacles, but they're more expressive than he knows. Natasha can read him like a book.

"_Just be careful with it," Bruce says, expressive eyes anxious but somehow alight behind his own set of glasses. "Pregnancy's a scary business, you know."_

_Natasha smirks. "I've seen worse." And he scowls at that, but by now it's just an old joke._

The doctor's eyes say there's no 'may have' about it, no matter the polite phrasing and cautious tests they'll put her through, just to make sure.

It's gone.

"_What the hell do you think you're doing out here?" Clint roars at her. Natasha hasn't seen him look this angry in a long time, and she automatically tenses. There are Doom-bots everywhere, but Clint is scarier._

"_I'm an Avenger," she retorts coldly, ice to his fire._

_But his fire is far more intense than her ice can take. "Get back to the Tower!" he yells. "You're not supposed to be out here, and you know it!"_

"_I'm not made of glass!" she shouts at him. "It's my _job_ to be out here."_

_His hands descend on her shoulders. Gently, with every bit of worried love Natasha has always seen in him, he murmurs, "Your job, Tasha, is to keep our child safe."_

_So she leaves. And only gets hit once by a stray bot, on the side, but—but that couln't have hurt._

_It couldn't have… died._

Natasha stares at the tiled flooring, unable to look at Clint's face. She doesn't want to see it. Doesn't want to see anything. But she can still hear.

And the baby's gone.

Her face is a mask of nothing. The room is suddenly cold, and a block of ice solidifies somewhere in her gut.

Part of her wonders if that's the dead baby.

* * *

"First of all, it was nothing you did, didn't do, ate, didn't eat, or anything. It's natural."

The doctor's first words.

"You know, twenty percent of clinically recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage."

The doctor's second words.

" "

The baby's first words. Natasha doesn't know why she thinks that.

"I'm not part of the twenty percent," Natasha's first words, because she never has been and she _can't_ be now. She's supposed to be the miniscule percentage, and that just probably means something worse is coming, so never mind—but can't she be part of the eighty percent? The majority, just this once?

It's still in there. The baby, without a heartbeat, or "no cardiac activity" like the radiologist says, dead. It's still in her body.

For a moment, a searing moment with the heat that Clint's fire never quite achieves, she hates herself. Hates this body that can't keep a baby alive, that _killed_ it.

She finds she hates a lot of things.

* * *

Sixteen days ago. It died more than two weeks ago, according to the developmental studies with the ultrasound. Natasha didn't even know. She should have known.

Clint waits up for her as she walks around in circles on the top of the Tower, up in the open air that's bitingly cold in the early spring, especially so high. She's glad he doesn't seem to think she's going to jump off the edge. But she won't admit to anyone that it crossed her mind once. Maybe twice. She won't jump, anyway, so it doesn't really matter.

After she gets tired of walking, she sits with her arms wrapped around her knees and stares at the New York skyline. Part of her is, as always, fascinated, but a larger part wishes the lights would all go out. Like the light went out in her womb.

The cold assassin that Natasha has never been able to expel from the back of her mind says she's being ridiculous, it's just a dead baby, she'd killed kids before she worked for SHIELD. Get up. Get a grip. You have work to do, stop moping, you're being a naïve little fool because don't you already know that love is for children?

The human part of her wins, and Natasha cries for the first time in years on top of Stark Tower. If Jarvis is watching, she knows that not even Tony would dream of passing comment.

She comes back down to hers and Clint's room at about one in the morning. He sees the tear tracks on her face and the skin around his eyes tightens in an almost sympathetic response.

He draws her in and kisses the last of the wetness from her cheeks. "It'll be alright," he says quietly, like he's confiding some great truth of life.

"Liar," Natasha whispers brokenly, but she doesn't cry.

* * *

It's not _technically_ a miscarriage. The definition of the word implies the expulsion of a fetus before it is viable. But the doctors said the fetus _was_ viable, and it hasn't expelled itself yet.

Besides, miscarriage isn't the right word anyway. Sounds like an accident. "Oops, I miscarried the baby; don't worry, dear, it won't happen again!" But it can't have been an accident. There must have been a reason.

Rhymes with 'marriage' and 'disparage' and 'baby carriage.' Is she ever going have a baby carriage?

Natasha taps away at a keyboard and finally finds the word she's looking for on a clinical webpage.

Missed miscarriage: "embryonic death without the expulsion of the fetus." Also known as a silent miscarriage. Concise, unemotional, exactly what Natasha knows how to work with.

She writes it out on several neat cards in neat handwriting to explain the situation, and leaves them where each of the Avengers will certainly find it. An excuse for her and Clint silently breaking down in their little corner of the Tower. Or maybe that's just her.

"We'll try again," he says, and she thinks 'maybe' but says nothing. Hopefully he can read it in her eyes, because words don't mean anything anymore and she can't say them.

She needs to find some good new words.

* * *

Natasha has managed to forget when she wakes up the next day. She opens her eyes and Clint's still asleep, his face mostly buried in the pillow, so she slips out of the room without waking him.

The first person she meets is Tony, in the kitchen, blearily messing around with the coffee machine. He downs half of his mug before he seems to recognize her. When he does, he gets a weird look on his face that Natasha doesn't quite bother to read into because, hey, it's a nice day out.

So when he speaks and his tone is honest-to-God serious, if still very Tony, she's confused for a bit.

"Pepper says I'm really bad with nice words," he begins inelegantly. "She's probably right, considering the usual reactions. But I get what you're going through, Nat. Well. I don't _know,_ because of, uh, obvious reasons, but you know. I'm here for you. I'm sorry for what happened."

And a glorious two minutes of not remembering suddenly ends. Natasha's eyes _don't_ sting with tears, and her lips _don't_ tremble, but her knuckles _do_ go white as she grips the table too hard.

"'Course, you're strong, but you got us, right? We're good shoulders to cry on. If you need it."

Natasha's heart clenches and she wonders _why the hell he would let someone cry on his shoulder with a dead baby inside her_, and doesn't look at him. "Pepper's right," she says flatly. "You're really bad with nice words."

She leaves him in the kitchen and rationalizes that breakfast isn't really that important after all.

* * *

Steve is the next person that manages to get past Natasha's walls to mention it. If mentioning it is even the word to use—he sets a picture on her and Clint's bed when they're not in. It's a drawing of the two of them, with a little caption claiming that '1 + 1 doesn't have to = 3' in pretty letters.

Natasha almost rips it to pieces on the spot, and hides it in her personal notebook because she's pretty sure Clint actually will.

It doesn't help. Nothing anyone can say can possibly help, why can't they get it? Even if any of them were women who _knew_, nothing they say can help.

There's still a dead baby in her body and _why is it still there_ and that's something she'd just like to retreat and lick her wounds about, thank you very much. Like a wounded animal, hurt and weak, hiding so it won't be attacked in its frailty.

The Natasha in the picture is much happier than the real one.

* * *

"You are brave beyond battles, Lady Natasha!" Thor booms, and Natasha seriously considers bolting. She doesn't want the crushing hug that comes. Doesn't want him clapping her back hard enough to almost make her bite her tongue, and three weeks ago she would have joked he might be squishing the baby.

But eighteen days ago, now, that baby died.

Which gives Natasha some morbid images of dead flesh mashed with tiny, delicate beginnings of bone and she wants to throw up. Hopefully, Thor isn't actually squishing her dead baby.

"May your days be numerous and your children many!"

_Maybe after I can actually have one without killing it,_ Natasha thinks. She's alarmingly close to tears and she extricates herself from Thor's company to go somewhere else, anywhere else. She ends up near Bruce, the only Avenger who hasn't tried talking to her in some way shape or form.

"I don't want to hear it," she says preemptively. "I am _not_ breaking down and even if I _was_ there's nothing any of you can say, so if you would I'd very much like to just go—" And she doesn't know what else to say, because all she wants is to _go._

Bruce lays a gentle hand on her shoulder and smiles softly. Surprising of itself: Bruce isn't one to initiate much contact, due to understandable reservations. Natasha should feel touched, but she doesn't want any exceptions made for her and her dead baby right now, and if Bruce tries saying he's sorry he's getting a fist to the face, Hulk be damned.

"I was just going to ask if you were planning to miscarry the baby naturally or go in for a D+C," he says, in his quiet, soft-spoken way and Natasha wants to hug him, just a little. Because at least he listened, even if it doesn't actually help any more than apologies do.

But Natasha only vaguely remembers those terms. "The doctor said something about that," she says slowly. Bruce readily explains it for her, slipping into an informative tone that makes it easier for her to listen to him.

"The baby's still inside, but it can't stay there forever. If you miscarry naturally, it'll happen soon, probably, but you won't be able to predict it. When it does come, there will be labor pains, cramping, heavy bleeding. And you were far enough along that you might not be able to get it all out on your own." Natasha feels sick at the explanation, but Bruce is looking politely at the wall so she allows one poignant expression and then banishes it from her face. "The other option is a D+C, Dilation and Curettage, which entails anesthesia, dilation, scraping, and suction. You'll be out for the whole thing so you won't have to see…" He trails off awkwardly.

"The dead baby," Natasha completes dully. The hall they're standing in is moving, she thinks, and then realizes belatedly that it's _her_. The next thing she knows, she's crouched over a toilet and heaving up the contents of her stomach as if she can expel the lifeless lump of flesh inside her through her mouth.

Bruce holds her hair back and awkwardly pats her back. Finally he settles for rubbing little circles at the base of her neck, and stares at anything but the broken woman in front of him as Natasha sobs and sobs and pretends she's just feeling poorly.

She doesn't know what to do; she just wants the baby _out, _no death inside her, but both options are just so grotesque when considering an unborn child. All she wants is for this baby in her body to live, to be alive.

For once, Natasha would like to create some life, rather than take it.

* * *

She schedules a D+C, for eight days into the future, the nearest opening. It should be sooner, she thinks; the baby must be rotting inside her by now, dead for so long and decaying. She almost throws up again but resists the urge.

Bruce is her new best friend in a crisis, because he never apologizes to her for this disaster. She tells him she hates the word 'miscarriage,' and 'fetus,' and just about every word with anything to do with her womb and her dead baby. Bruce nods along and supplies a few words in Portuguese and Hindi for miscarriages, but while they're more exotic Natasha hears them like she hears every relevant word she knows in any tongue and hates them too. He says he'll keep looking.

And Bruce helps her in other ways, too. Because even if his memory as the Hulk is hazy, he remembers when Clint made her leave the fight—and she got hit on the side anyway. "It wasn't that," he says. "I'm sure it wasn't. Conception, pregnancy, birth—this cycle has been going on for thousands of years in us humans. We're not dead yet. A tap like that wasn't to blame, Natasha. These things just _happen._"

She is a liar first and foremost, so she lies to herself and believes him. Is she lying? A part of her hopes not, but that part may be too faithful to be believed.

Clint rocks her back and forth before they even try going to sleep. Like she's a child; and it hurts, because the only child in this equation is the dead one inside her womb.

"It will be okay someday," Clint murmurs into her neck.

"No it won't," she replies simply.

Clint gives a shaky sigh. "Tasha. What has to happen, to make this okay?"

The only answer is impossible. "The baby has to live."

Clint swears quietly. "Natasha…"

She feels empty. "Then I guess it will never be okay," she says, and her words are distant to her own ears.

"We can try again," Clint whispers, and Natasha doesn't reply.

* * *

She's given a brief leave from her duties as an Avenger and an agent of SHIELD and doesn't know who to blame. Clint swears up and down it wasn't him, he knows her too well to think he'd escape it with his neck, but timidly points out that this entire mess would be on her medical files now.

Suddenly, she's crying (way too much, lately) and Clint is thrown off guard but recovers remarkably well. He wraps her in his arms and they rock back and forth, seated on the floor, until Natasha regains enough control to stammer out something about more red in her ledger she truly can't erase.

He tries to change her mind, but there is no getting around another death. _Inside_.

She just wanted it to live.

* * *

Going into the D+C, Natasha has a few questions.

Like if they'll be able to tell if the baby was supposed to be a boy or a girl, once they get it out. DNA testing, maybe, since they can't tell from the ultrasound at this stage. Tony started a betting pool, back when the news was first announced, and someone should get their money. Right?

And she kind of wants to know what happens to the baby after they take it out. An undeveloped dead thing that may or may not look more like a lima bean than a human. Do they bury it? Burn it? Preserve it in formaldehyde, or something?

Is she a mother?

They put her under anesthesia, and when she wakes up, she doesn't ask any of these questions. Clint is there, waiting when she comes to with an uncomfortable mask on her face. She stays on painkillers clear up until the prescription ends, not something she usually does, because it dulls her mind too, which is in just as much (more) pain than her body.

Her nightmares are of a misshapen, ghostly, bloody baby crying out to her. 'Mama.' But she doesn't know if she's a mother, doesn't know if it's _really_ a child with a soul, when does a soul come along anyway? She doesn't have a soul—and then she wakes up with a scream halfway to her throat and cold sweat soaking through her nightclothes.

She'll never know if her baby was supposed to be a boy or a girl. She'll never know, if she wants to make any memorabilia, if it's supposed to be blue or pink.

And the body is forever lost. As a killer, she knows that is worst of all.

* * *

The others are tiptoeing around her, and part of Natasha wants to reject that, but they're tiptoeing around Bruce all the time so what's the difference? And she doesn't want any real confrontation right now. She's trying to heal, trying to move on, but half of her is still screaming for her lost child and the assassin in the back of her head sneers that she doesn't know where the body is.

She asks the doctor when she goes in for her post-surgical checkup. The dead fetus was cremated. They could have performed a chromosomal check for the gender, before, it's not unusual; but even if Natasha now knows one answer, she has forever given up the right to know the other.

Maybe it will be better for moving on, she cajoles herself, and then passes it off as childish fantasy.

She's barely getting back into the swing of things, now, setting out to wage war along her comrades, but things are a little different. Tony's casual comments are more careful, Clint is watching her like a worried hen. Really only Steve manages professionalism, this time; Natasha accepts an unexpected but not unsurprising offer to ride on the Hulk's shoulder on the way back to the Tower, mostly to get away from them all. He lifts her up onto his right shoulder with care, not because she's broken, but because she's only human. As the Hulk walks, Natasha crosses her ankles neatly and wonders idly if Pepper has yet realized that she is not ready to talk about anything and never will be.

Later that night, Bruce approaches her with a smile that's almost too sad. "I think I found the word," he says.

The word is mizuko. It's the Japanese word for a dead fetus. Literally translated, 'water child.' Natasha thinks it must have the same failings as all the other words when it's in its own language, but Japanese is not hers and so the 'water child' is. The imagery is peaceful, a flowing river, going down into the ocean and away and away and away.

Not rotting inside her, instead leaving her, and maybe if that baby wasn't meant to stay, someday one will.

She drags Clint down to the Hudson River.

* * *

Natasha highly doubts any child in Japan would ever be named Mizuko, considering, and so she has no idea if it would be a boy or a girl. Appropriate.

She writes the name, as carefully as she wrote those cards to her team, on a piece of paper, where it will be seen once it's folded into a boat. For a long moment, she stares at her handiwork, only looking away when her vision blurs and she can't really see it anymore.

Clint draws her close and she leans into him.

They crouch down together, and Natasha gently sets their water child into the river, to be carried away by the current.

"Will we try again?" Clint whispers in her ear. It's dark out, and Natasha looks up at the night sky. When she looks back to the river, her water child is farther along, traveling away, and away, and away.

"Not yet," she says quietly. Clint smiles; it's a promise from her.

They stand and walk away from the water hand in hand.

Neither will see the water child when it sinks.

* * *

**Drop a line if you feel so inclined.**

**~Un**Adulterat_ed_


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